{{Article summary text|This article covers tools that are available for benchmarking and what they can be used for.}}

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Benchmarking is the act of measuring performance and comparing the results to another system's results or a widely accepted standard through a unified procedure. This unified method of evaluating system performance can help answer questions such as:

Benchmarking is the act of measuring performance and comparing the results to another system's results or a widely accepted standard through a unified procedure. This unified method of evaluating system performance can help answer questions such as:

Stand alone tools

glxgears (and why not to use this as a benchmark)

# pacman -S mesa-demos

Glxgears is a popular OpenGL test that renders a very simple OpenGL performance and outputs the frame rate. Though glxgears can be useful as a test of direct rendering capabilities of the graphics driver, glxgears is an outdated tool that is not representative of the current state of linux graphics and overall OpenGL possibilities.

So to summarize, glxgears only tests a small part of what you typically see in a 3D game. You could have glxgears FPS performance increase, but your 3D game performance decrease. Likewise, you could have glxgears performance decrease and your 3D game performance increase. source

superpi

interbench

This benchmark application is designed to benchmark interactivity in Linux.

It is designed to measure the effect of changes in Linux kernel design or system configuration changes such as CPU, I/O scheduler and filesystem changes and options. With careful benchmarking, different hardware can be compared.

(n)ttcp

(n)ttcp measures point-to-point bandwidth over any network connection, the binary must be provided on both nodes between which you want to determine bandwidth. nttcp is a a much more convenient rewrite of ttcp.

iperf

iperf is a very easy to use point-to-point bandwidth testing tool that can use either TCP or UDP. It has nicely formatted output and a parallel test mode.

iozone

Hardinfo

HardInfo can gather information about your system's hardware and operating system, perform benchmarks, and generate printable reports either in HTML or in plain text formats. Hardinfo performs CPU and FPU benchmarks and has a very clean GTK UI.

Phoronix Test Suite

The Phoronix Test Suite is the most comprehensive testing and benchmarking platform available for the Linux operating system. This software is designed to effectively carry out both qualitative and quantitative benchmarks in a clean, reproducible, and easy-to-use manner. This software is based upon the extensive Linux benchmarking work and internal tools developed by Phoronix.com since 2004 along with input from leading tier-one computer hardware vendors. This software is open-source and licensed under the GNU GPLv3. The Phoronix Test Suite consists of a lightweight processing core (pts-core) with each benchmark consisting of an XML-based profile with related resource scripts. The process from the benchmark installation, to the actual benchmarking, to the parsing of important hardware and software components is heavily automated and completely repeatable, asking users only for confirmation of actions.

PTS Desktop Live 2010.1

As an alternative to the installation of the Phoronix Test Suite to the system, Phoronix also provides a Live-CD. This Live-CD offers all the features of the Phoronix Test Suite and includes the latest ATI and NVIDIA binary drivers. It will allow you to run 40+ benchmarks from a live environment without the need to store anything on your hard drive and includes a working GUI interface.